My laptop battery has died. It was working fine yesterday, but today I shifted slightly on the sofa, dislodging the power cable and the laptop blinked out. It still works when tethered to the wall - but the battery is shot. TIME TO BUY A NEW LAPTOP! Because shipping in non-essentials from China is so easy right now... Nah, I'll just replace the battery. A fifteen quid job rather an a grand…
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You can't post raw audio to Twitter directly. It sucks. Sure, you can post links to audio, but it's not quite the same. Here's a couple of Linux one-liners which will turn audio into simple video suitable for uploading to social media. Waves This converts audio to a waveform: ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -filter_complex "[0:a]showwaves=s=640x480:mode=line,format=yuv420p[v]" -map "[v]" -map 0:a -c:v…
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Here's a curious bug I just discovered in Firefox 67 for Linux. Can you see this unicorn: →🦄 ← What happens if you use CSS to change the opacity of an emoji? Here's a unicorn, with a pink font colour: 🦄 Unicorn Let's wrap that in this scrap of CSS to make it 50% opaque. color: rgba(255, 105, 180, 0.5); 🦄 Unicorn Hopefully, you see a semi-transparent philosophical argument. What if we set …
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Mostly notes to myself, as a follow-up to this older post. This is a 3-step process. Add the file to an MKV Use MKVmerge: mkvmerge "audio.wav" --chapters "audio.cue" -o "audio.mkv" You can see that chapter names have been added to the .mkv if you run ffmpeg -i or mkvinfo. Split the MKV by chapter This generates one file per chapter: mkvmerge -D -S "audio.mkv" --split chapters:all -o…
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DVD-Audio (henceforce DVDA) is an unloved and mostly forgotten audio format. Nevertheless, there's a large back-catalogue of music which is still trapped on ancient discs encoded in the proprietary MLP format. A few years ago I wrote about how to extract the audio using the obsolete Windows program DVD-Audio Explorer. I wanted to be able to run the extraction via the command line, which means…
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Can a mouse ever be worth £100? Yes. Let's get that out of the way. If you spend all day working with your hands, you owe it to yourself to give them the best possible equipment to protect them. For me, that's a vertical mouse with re-mappable buttons to help prevent RSI. Over the last few years, I've purchased several Evoluent mice. They've kindly sent me their latest model so I can write a …
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This is a quick guide for setting up your new mouse with Ubuntu. I'm a big fan of the Evoluent Mouse range, and I've agreed to publish this Linux guide in return for a review sample. The Basics The only way to configure this mouse is via the command-line. This may look a bit daunting, but I promise you it's simple. Just copy and paste the highlighted code. Open up a Terminal. You'll usually…
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As ever, notes to myself. This is a method to take a .wav and .cue and transform it into individual files. In this case, .opus. Transform to .flac FLAC is a good intermediary file format, especially for surround sound files. avconv -i file.wav out.flac Transform to .opus An optional step if you want smaller files. Maximum quality for 6 channel audio. opusenc --bitrate 4096 out.flac…
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The Video Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentEVERY EMOJI! pic.x.com/2fcuqwu67c❤️ 1,306💬 54🔁 020:09 - Tue 24 October 2017 Download the WEBM version (19MB). The Process Mostly notes to myself, but I thought you lot might be interested 🙂 Get Every Emoji from Twemoji Twitter maintain the Twemoji Project - it contains high quality SVGs of every emoji. They generously make them available under CC-BY…
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The good folk at Ailipu Technology have sent me a fist-sized USB camera to review. This is a cheap and simple way to get external video into a home server like a Raspberry Pi. This is the, slightly cumbersomely named, elp-usb100w05mt-dl36. What's in the box? The USB cable is around 5 metres long, and is wired into the camera. Four screws and rawlplugs are also included. Why? Because there…
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Here's how to solve a common WordPress problem. I want to re-import all my blog's images into the media library. I've moved my blog to a new host - but kept the same domain name. I started with a new WordPress install, the uploads folder still has all my images, but WordPress can't see them. None of the plugins I found worked with huge amounts of images spread across multiple directories. One …
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I read a Guardian article about an artist who set up an analogue camera in front of their TV, set it to long exposure, and set a movie playing. The result was a rather wonderful collection of images. You can see more of Jason Shulman's works Is there a way to automate this process? Yes! Here's my attempt at a "Long Exposure" of "Taxi Driver". It's not the same as Shulmans's process, but I …
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